On February 17, Giordano Bruno, a great Italian thinker and a convinced supporter of Copernicus’ doctrine of the heliocentric system of the world, perished at the stake of the Inquisition. His last words were: “To burn is not to refute.”
Filippo Bruno was born into a soldier’s family near Naples in 1548.
In 1565, 17-year-old Filippo Bruno entered a Dominican monastery, taking the name Giordano. Studying the sciences and the works of Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno came to the conclusion that the Church’s natural-scientific ideas were mistaken. Giordano began speaking publicly in disputations throughout Europe, exposing the Church’s ignorance. Upon returning to Italy in 1592, Bruno was arrested and imprisoned. The basis for the arrest was not so much the idea of the infinity of the Universe and the multitude of inhabited worlds as the very fact of mocking the foundations of faith. Eight years of imprisonment did not change Giordano’s worldview; torture did not break his belief in the correctness of his judgments. Giordano Bruno preferred the stake to renouncing his convictions.
A whole chain of denunciations and reprisals against Boris Godunov’s ill-wishers began. In October, the Romanovs were accused of malicious intent regarding the tsar’s life. A Duma commission to resolve this problem was specially staffed with opponents of the Romanovs from among the high-ranking boyars. Fyodor, the leader of the Romanov clan, was tonsured a monk under the name Filaret (the father of Mikhail Romanov, the future Russian tsar), and his three brothers were sent to Siberia, where all of them died under harsh conditions.
The founding of the English East India Company.